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Judgment no. 571/2026 of the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation, delivered on 9 June 2026 and filed with reasons on 22 July, marks a moment of clarity in an area where confusion has up to this time been the rule. The Sixth Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation declared inadmissible the appeal in cassation lodged by the Catanzaro Public Prosecutor’s Office against a decision of the Preliminary Hearing Judge (GUP) to issue a defence-oriented European Investigation Order addressed to the French judicial authorities. The objective was to enable the defendants in the “Ostro” proceedings, against the alleged ’Ndrangheta group “Cosca Gallace”, to exercise effectively the French domestic legal remedy under Article 694-41 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, in order to challenge the authenticity, integrity and traceability of the decrypted conversations from the SKY ECC application, transmitted to Italy through international judicial cooperation. This remedy allows measures taken in France in execution of a European Investigation Order to be challenged, for their nullity to be sought or for them to be contested through other avenues of appeal, under the same conditions as if they were a domestic measure.

The significance of the judgment extends beyond a single set of proceedings. The Italian Court of Cassation expressly validated the procedural route that our law firm has publicly and procedurally maintained for more than two years. Where the prosecution’s digital evidence originates from a foreign investigation, the defence is entitled to use the channels of the issuing country (France in the case of SKY ECC evidence) to scrutinise and assess its quality, provided that the defence has made efforts to challenge that evidence. In the Catanzaro case, the defence repeatedly requested access from the French authorities to the source documents of the SKY ECC operation, to verify the lawfulness of the collection of the evidence and to activate in France the remedies provided for by Article 694‑41 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Faced with the silence of the French authorities, the Preliminary Hearing Judge acted through a European Investigation Order (EIO), designed to preserve the investigative documents and guarantee the defendants a genuine opportunity to exercise legal remedies in the executing State (France).

The Italian judgment does not stand in isolation. It forms part of an increasingly unified body of case-law. The Court of Justice of the European Union, in its M.N. judgment in Case C-670/22 of 30 April 2024, constructed the architecture of what is known as dual protection, under which the executing State reviews the collection of the evidence, while the State issuing the European Investigation Order reviews whether rights are respected when that evidence is assessed. A few months later, the European Court of Human Rights, in its judgment of 24 September 2024 in A.L. and E.J. v. France, confirmed the existence of the French domestic remedy and made its use a prerequisite for the admissibility of the defendants’ applications. The French Court of Cassation itself, by judgment no. 24-84.262 of 16 September 2025, formally referred a question to Luxembourg in Case C-625/25 Prudniez concerning the genuine effectiveness of these remedies.

The trajectory now leads to Strasbourg. The European Court of Human Rights has communicated the cases Silgir, Raal, Isha and Emmen to the Governments of Germany, Estonia and Norway, together with a set of questions concerning the lawfulness, integrity and use as evidence in criminal proceedings of encrypted evidence from EncroChat, ANOM and SKY ECC. The questions formulated leave no room for ambiguity. Was the encrypted evidence decisive for the conviction? Were there sufficient safeguards to verify integrity and authenticity? Did the defence have a genuine opportunity to challenge the material? Did the inability to examine the chain of custody create procedural inequality? Were the domestic courts able to assess reliability? Were the complete databases transmitted, or only selected extracts? Through this series of questions, the Court articulates a decalogue of the right of defence in the digital age.

The trend extends beyond Europe. In the United States, in United States v. Gogic before the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Case No. 22-CR-493, the order of October 2025 excluded the vast majority of the Excel spreadsheets generated from SKY ECC for lack of authentication. The certificate issued by the French authority was deemed unclear, no witness with first-hand knowledge of the decryption processes was available, and anomalies in the spreadsheets, such as duplications, traces of algorithmic processing and post-seizure modifications, remained unexplained. In Montenegro, which has the legal system closest to ours in terms of procedural culture, on 14 February 2025 the Podgorica Court of Appeal quashed the first judgment based on SKY ECC in Ilić and Others, stating that the court of first instance had failed to give reasons concerning the lawfulness, legal nature and compatibility of the material with the principles of the domestic legal system.

In this dynamic jurisprudential landscape, extending from Rome to Luxembourg, from Strasbourg to New York and from The Hague to Podgorica, the Albanian court continues to remain within an isolated capsule. The prosecution’s digital evidence is treated as a given solely because it has arrived through channels of international legal assistance. However, the argument that the evidence is lawful because it was transmitted by a European State such as France no longer satisfies any contemporary standard of due process of law. It does not satisfy the requirements of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as Strasbourg has affirmed. It does not satisfy those of Article 47 of the Charter of Nice, as Luxembourg has affirmed. Nor does it satisfy those of Article 42 of the Albanian Constitution, which guarantees effective defence and equality of arms.
The Albanian court is called upon to understand the nature of digital evidence, to understand that an Excel table (spreadsheet) is not an administrative document, but the product of a technical chain of interception, decryption, interpretation and processing that must be verified. It is called upon to recognise the defence’s right to challenge the reliability, integrity and traceability of this chain, not as a procedural privilege, but as an indispensable condition of proceedings that afford effective protection. Refusal to accept this evolution is a choice that carries costs both for the Court and for SPAK, since the decisions risk failing to withstand scrutiny by Strasbourg and, overall, this presents us as a justice system that is gradually distancing itself from the standards in respect of which it has undertaken formal and substantive obligations.

The route to France, that of a court-issued request for mutual legal assistance for defence purposes aimed at challenging the “technical black box” at its source, is not a lawyer’s whim. It is the procedural direction charted by the European system. Our law firm asserted this two years ago, when the argument still seemed utopian in Albanian courtrooms. In cooperation with our partners in France, we have applied to the Paris Court of Appeal to do what the Italian Court of Cassation has confirmed: challenge the lawfulness of SKY ECC evidence. The June 2026 judgment of the Italian Court of Cassation, based on the evolving European acquis, now proves this beyond doubt. The task remaining for us lawyers is not to lose this legal season too by pretending that nothing is happening. Therefore, the ordinary trial, the debate on the evidence, the application to take rebuttal evidence, the request to transmit letters rogatory, and the challenge to SKY ECC evidence before the French courts must not be regarded as alternatives, but as necessary to ensure due process of law.